Word Order in English-Japanese Simultaneous Interpretation: Analyses and Evaluation using Chunk-wise Monotonic Translation

Kosuke Doi, Yuka Ko, Mana Makinae, Katsuhito Sudoh, Satoshi Nakamura


Abstract
This paper analyzes the features of monotonic translations, which follow the word order of the source language, in simultaneous interpreting (SI). Word order differences are one of the biggest challenges in SI, especially for language pairs with significant structural differences like English and Japanese. We analyzed the characteristics of chunk-wise monotonic translation (CMT) sentences using the NAIST English-to-Japanese Chunk-wise Monotonic Translation Evaluation Dataset and identified some grammatical structures that make monotonic translation difficult in English-Japanese SI. We further investigated the features of CMT sentences by evaluating the output from the existing speech translation (ST) and simultaneous speech translation (simulST) models on the NAIST English-to-Japanese Chunk-wise Monotonic Translation Evaluation Dataset as well as on existing test sets. The results indicate the possibility that the existing SI-based test set underestimates the model performance. The results also suggest that using CMT sentences as references gives higher scores to simulST models than ST models, and that using an offline-based test set to evaluate the simulST models underestimates the model performance.
Anthology ID:
2024.iwslt-1.30
Volume:
Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT 2024)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand (in-person and online)
Editors:
Elizabeth Salesky, Marcello Federico, Marine Carpuat
Venue:
IWSLT
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
254–264
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.iwslt-1.30
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.iwslt-1.30
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Kosuke Doi, Yuka Ko, Mana Makinae, Katsuhito Sudoh, and Satoshi Nakamura. 2024. Word Order in English-Japanese Simultaneous Interpretation: Analyses and Evaluation using Chunk-wise Monotonic Translation. In Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT 2024), pages 254–264, Bangkok, Thailand (in-person and online). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Word Order in English-Japanese Simultaneous Interpretation: Analyses and Evaluation using Chunk-wise Monotonic Translation (Doi et al., IWSLT 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.iwslt-1.30.pdf